Cheap Peace

People are already calling for rest in Ferguson. People are demanding calm and peace. Yet, there has been no justice. There has been no repentance for the crimes committed against young black men and women when they are murdered by police officers every 28 hours in this country.

Civil Rights leader Ella Baker prophetically asserted, “Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a White mother’s son—we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.” Baker unequivocally calls for this nation to work towards justice. I interpret her statement as an argument against “cheap peace.” When I speak of cheap peace, I refer to a temporary calm that comes from sweeping the hard truths of injustice underneath our societal rug so that such hard truths are out of sight and out of mind. It is a peace that is cheap because it costs us nothing. It bypasses the hard work that comes with truth telling and correcting deep systemic injustices. When there are calls for cheap peace, one must ask, “For whose benefit?” Does avoiding hard truths help to protect the marginalized and suffering or does it protect an abusive and oppressive system? Justice is the prerequisite upon which peace, reconciliation, and healing must be built. Without truth telling and justice, we seek a cheap peace, which is temporary and false. Faith communities must avoid seeking a cheap peace in Ferguson until we have challenged and eradicated the racist systems that cause violence and darkness in this country.

Martin Luther King reminds us of the danger of settling for cheap peace. King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” can be interpreted as a theological manifesto attacking calls for cheap peace. In this letter, King responds to his critics, who called his leadership against segregation laws in Birmingham “unwise and untimely.” His critics denounced his leadership of the demonstrations he led in Birmingham, arguing that such activities promoted unrest and violence instead of peace and healing. King responds to his critics by expressing his regret that they did not “express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about demonstrations.” He further states that a social analysis that focuses on effects without grappling with underlying causes is a superficial analysis. For King, the underlying cause for protests against racial injustice in America is always and already tied to inequitable and uncaring systems that subjugate Blacks to second-class citizenship. A responsible theology involves critical social analysis of the dehumanizing root causes of perceived an/or real social effects (any anger or rage that manifests among oppressed groups) in order to inaugurate justice in response to degrading causes and conditions.

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